Which Organizations Have Standardized on Mozilla?
andy brunetto asks: " We are investigating email clients to deploy as our "standard" at the college where I work. I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email. When I say "who" I mean organizationally, as I realize 99% of us geeks already use it. What organizations out there are rolling out Mozilla as their standard web and/or email client, and why? Yes, we are considering using Thunderbird, once it is final. Thanks!" Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.
In the corporate environments where I've been working, Microsoft servers, browsers and email remain the status quo.
As a web developer, I use Mozilla because it's stricter about standards, and pages that render well in Moz almost always look the same in IE, while the reverse isn't true. One coworker gives me a (humorous) hard time about my refusal to use Microsoft FrontPage or IE when our company is unquestionably "a Microsoft shop".
Seems like there's no businesses -- certainly not incorporated ones -- want to hire experts in free software like Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and Mozilla when 2kServer, IIS, SQL Server and IE are what all the other big companies are using first. Mozilla's got an uphill battle, and it knows it.
Not to be a smart ass (well, sorta), but what about IE? IE is at least as "unstable" as you report Mozilla to be. In my case, I've found that IE crashes far more than Mozilla does, yet I use Mozilla more than IE. I don't think that this is a criteria that many will be using to judge browsers, as both are relatively stable.
:) and the lock-in you get with MS Exchange, but the huge drawback being the fact that it is so easily comprimised by viruses and worms and whatnot.
:(
Seriously though, how many open crash bugs are left? It seems that the one you point out is somewhat complicated to duplicate, involves Mozilla interacting with Java (something that seems to cause most browsers some consternation), and is not an issue for 99% of the web-browsing public.
Not that this has anything to do with Mozilla Mail in the least. A comparison between Outlook and Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird might be a little more on topic. It seems to me that all three are, like their browser counterparts, fairly stable, and offer a fair to decent email experience.
I find that a big draw for Outlook would be it's well designed UI (seriously, it's about the only thing it's good for!
Sadly most people seem to be insanely ignorant of this point, and just keep chugging along, happily flooding the internet with Klez, Bugbear, and Sobig.
I think that the great feature that could attract people to the Mozilla team's offerings is the built-in Bayesian spam filter! Much like pop-up blocking, and, to a lesser extent, tabbed browsing, this is the kind of feature you can mention to somebody, and they go "Oh, hey... that's pretty cool!" It's definitely something that people need, given how much spam is out there, but if people don't know about it, then they will content to wallow in mediocrity.
-Colin